“Christy Funsch’s experiment in showing solo dances to one audience member at a time is daring and delightful. I was able to see two solos on Friday March 9 and one on Sunday March 11, performed for me alone. The dancer’s energy changes between these moments and, then, during the performance; we are challenged to see how and why. We all, critics or not, need to learn to really see dance. Funsch’s vocabulary moves between large lyrical or expansive movements and, towards and away from the body, with small gestures that often touch the torso or the face. In my imagination, I have named the process “in and out,” since these extreme changes echo thoughtful and emotional states, uncertain but provocative.” Joanna G. Harris, March 2012, Culturevulture.net
“Christy Funsch’s solo, “Box Elder” to Pavement Box and Helene Renaunt “Russalka’s Lament” was a lament indeed, full of nostalgia and meditation and Funsch’s carefully structured use of intimate gesture and space”
Joanna G. Harris, April 2010, Culturevulture.net
“Christy Funsch, choreographer and dancer, excels at the dance put on in a small space for a small audience. She puts me in mind of Marian McPartland’s jazz piano playing, the artistry is exquisite, first-class, but the effects are most telling when they are most subtle. Insidious Hope,danced in one of the small studios in Project Artaud, was the most intimate dancing I saw all year. Her stage mask is like the classic actress Jean Arthur’s, and like Arthur, she uses her privacy to great purpose. Her tiniest move has outsized significance”
Paul Parish, Year-End Dance Picks, 2009, Bay Area Reporter
“In this festival everyone gets five minutes. That’s one image, one gesture, one relationship, one moment within a twelve-scene event. In this context Christy Funsch made a clear and subtle choice. Alternating curvy sensual gestures and sharp punctuating lines, Funsch slowly traversed the stage. The music, like the dancing, was emotional but not dramatic. Reading her body’s writing from audience left to right, I was drawn into the choreography, and therefore the body, and thus an intimate encounter”
Keith Hennessey, August 2008, Culturevulture.net
“Christy Funsch’s Dapper Indiscretion Blues finds this excellent Bay Area dancer sidling and shrugging her way through a quirky solo that signifies a distinctive sensibility”
Allan Ulrich, August 21, 2008, Voice of Dance
“…lucidly conceived and playful…thoughtful, intriguingly structured choreography, beautifully realized by an excellent quintet of lush performers”
Rita Felciano-Dance View Times
“…a logic that is sensory and a rationale that is as pleasurable as it is intuitive.” “…maybe best of all is Funsch’s piece Excitation Modes, in which she places the members of the San Francisco Guitar Quartet in the four corners of the space, and simply lets her dancers inhabit the musicians’ sonorous universe.”
Rita Felciano-Guardian
“As a dancer she is technically precise and performatively nuanced, simultaneously solid and insouciant. Her expressions affect direct speech. Watching her is like being in dialogue with her; she’s that focused and clear.”
Sima Belmar-Guardian